


on cherche des sorties de secours

by postcardmystery



Category: The Hour
Genre: Colonialism, Domestic Violence, F/M, M/M, Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-26
Updated: 2012-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-19 13:55:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/573983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no going back for Freddie Lyon, failed journalist, ex-communist, the son of a dead father and the best friend of a girl who’s always going to be too good for him. There might, however, be a grand return for Frederick Lyon, but he does not exist yet, and Freddie stands on the Golden Gate Bridge, looks down at where his fingers grip the metal, knows that if Frederick Lyon is to exist that these hands are the only ones capable of building him.</p><p> </p><p>Freddie in San Francisco, and Freddie in Paris.</p>
            </blockquote>





	on cherche des sorties de secours

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for domestic violence, references to French Algeria and American segregation, and classisim.

It’s in San Franciso that it hits him: there is no going back. 

Oh, there’s _literal_ going back, of course, but even that would be difficult; barely thirty dollars in his pocket and nothing (everything) to go back to. He sat before that camera and he told the truth, but not enough of it, and not because, as he now knows better than anyone, that there is never such thing as _enough_. He had the facts and he had the words and he said the wrong ones, and live television, like life, does not offer second chances. He said what he said, and he did what he did, and if he wants to go back, he cannot go back the boy who won’t meet his eyes in the mirror.

There is no going back for Freddie Lyon, failed journalist, ex-communist, the son of a dead father and the best friend of a girl who’s always going to be too good for him. There might, however, be a grand return for Frederick Lyon, but he does not exist yet, and Freddie stands on the Golden Gate Bridge, looks down at where his fingers grip the metal, knows that if Frederick Lyon is to exist that these hands are the only ones capable of building him.

The sun sets, red, in his hair, and he wishes that he felt regret, but all he feels is the wind against his face and the paper of the cigarette between his lips. Too late for regret, then. No matter. If he can work with anything, he can work with that.

 

 

He sees more of the States than he’s ever seen of England. His accent provokes something new in these people; deference, sometimes, hostility, too, almost in equal measure. He gets on buses with segregated seating and feels dirty for hours afterwards. He meets businessmen born in slums, and Mayors whose parents bought into the American dream with all their cash could buy and were not disappointed. He drives (and learns to drive) and chatters to his cameraman, a softly-spoken New Englander named Edgar, and he drives and he drives and when he looks back on a desolate freeway it does not feel like a betrayal. He writes Bel a dozen postcards and she does not reply to a single one. There’s something bleeding into the air, something he never felt in England, and he lies awake and smokes all night in fleabag motels, and wants to feel homesick, and never quite does.

 

 

They inform him he is being sent to Paris, because the Americans love him and the head of the American BBC operations hates him. (Which is no surprise, because Algernon Huntington has a past that tells that same old story: The Dragon School, Eton, Oxford, power power _power_.) Freddie receives the news still and quiet, letting himself enjoy how Huntington is watching and waiting for the cracks to appear, and when Freddie shakes his hand he says, “Do you know, I don’t even speak French.”

“Hmm, of course, says Huntington, and then, and only then, does Freddie let his smile turn sour and cruel.

“But you do, and yet you’re here, aren’t you?” he says, and he does not find out, not for as long as he lives, Huntington’s answer.

 

 

Paris is grey and loud and beautiful. It rains every day for two weeks and Freddie breaks and buys a thick, entirely Parisian overcoat. Voices slip over him in a tongue he can’t understand like water droplets over the surface of a river, and his colleagues at the station laugh openly at his appalling accent.

“I asked for you personally,” says Randall, a man Freddie cannot quite get the measure of, and Freddie does not ask what he once would have asked, says, merely, “Thank you. Honestly. Huntington thought I was a right oik.”

“He does that,” says Randall, and does something that might be a smile.

Because it’s time for the question, the only question that matters, _the_ question, Freddie takes a deep breath and says, “What do you want me to do?”

“Oh,” says Randall, hand resting on an obsessively organised desk, “This and that, Mr Lyon. This and that.”

 

 

He meets her at the theatre. Her hair is not blonde and her eyes are not brown, and for reasons he does not want to examine, this matters. She is liquid in French and sibilant in English, cleverer than him and the way she says his name makes his heart beat faster. They fuck the second night, not the first, and he mumbles worshipful nonsense into her neck, looks into wide blue eyes and tries to forget his troubles. He is too old to be doing this, to think that this is how it works, but he does it anyway, does it because he must do something, and the list of possibilities is getting very short indeed.

 

 

He reads her Kerouac while rain drips down the window panes and she sings to him something that might be jazz, the lyrics too fast for him to catch; he ruins a politician and exposes a gambling ring and makes a very, very controversial report on Algeria; he sends no more postcards.

 

 

He asks her to marry him and she whispers _Je t’aime_ before _oui_. The night before last she pushed him off their doorstep, and last night he’d said the most cruel things he could think of just because he could, a long bruise at his wrist from a Paris street and her tears still wet against his cheekbone. She says yes before of course she says yes, an orphan like him, and wraps her arms around his neck, and when the bottom drops out of his stomach he doesn’t know whether it’s telling him to run away, or just to run.

 

 

He burns the novel he was never going to write the night before they take a boat from Calais. He burns his memories of Bel’s smile and Hector’s hands and all the things he was never going to have and was always going to be too afraid to ask for. Camille breathes heavy in her sleep and he smokes and forces his mind to go blank and does not ask himself the most important question of all: _is there any coming back from this?_

 

 

He kisses his wife at the Gare d'Austerlitz and when she says, low in his ear, _Je t’aime_ , he answers with a smile and a hand cupped to the back of her neck and silence.


End file.
